Anime & manga research

Look up anime and manga titles, characters, staff, and rankings as normalized JSON from the Crawlora API — no scraping fan-wiki or tracker-site pages.

When to use this skill

• "Tell me about this anime/manga" (synopsis, genres, status, score).
• "Who's in the cast / who worked on this?" (characters, staff).
• "What's airing this season?" / "top-ranked anime by genre/year."
• "Find titles similar to ."
• "Search for a character by name" across titles.

Setup (one-time)

• Get a free Crawlora API key (2,000 credits/mo, no card) at https://crawlora.net.
• Set CRAWLORA_API_KEY in the environment before running the helper.
• The helper reads CRAWLORA_API_KEY from the environment and sends requests to https://api.crawlora.net/api/v1. Missing/invalid key → 401.

How it works

1. Anime — /anime/search (query) to find a title id, then /anime/title/{id} for detail (accepts a raw id or mal for a MyAnimeList id), /anime/title/{id}/characters, /anime/title/{id}/staff, /anime/title/{id}/recommendations. /anime/rankings (filter by season, season_year, genre, format, status) and /anime/airing-schedule cover charts and what's currently airing. /anime/character/{id} and /anime/character/search (query) look up a character directly.
2. Manga — mirrors anime: /manga/search (query) → /manga/title/{id} (accepts mal too); /manga/rankings for charts.

Full endpoint list, methods, and params: reference/endpoints.md.

Calling the API

# Anime:
scripts/crawlora.sh /anime/search query="Frieren" | jq '.'
scripts/crawlora.sh /anime/title/154587 | jq '.'
scripts/crawlora.sh /anime/airing-schedule | jq '.'

# Manga:
scripts/crawlora.sh /manga/search query="Frieren" | jq '.'
scripts/crawlora.sh /manga/rankings | jq '.'

Use scripts/crawlora.sh for all requests; it keeps the API key out of command-line arguments.

Endpoint reference

See reference/endpoints.md for every Anime and Manga endpoint this skill uses.

Examples

• Seasonal roundup: /anime/rankings filtered by season+season_year for a ranked list of the season's titles.
• Deep-dive: /anime/title/{id} + /characters + /staff for a full profile of one show.
• "What's next": /anime/title/{id}/recommendations for similar titles to watch after finishing one.

Notes & limits

• Credits / pay-on-success: billed only on 2xx; free tier 2,000 credits/mo. Key at https://crawlora.net.
• Public data only — public title/tracker pages.
• Security: key lives in CRAWLORA_API_KEY only — never hardcode, query-param, or commit it.
• Title/character detail needs the platform's own id — resolve via .../search first if you only have a name.
• List endpoints are paginated (page/per_page) — walk pages for full coverage.